Why everyone should write a blog
Because it makes you think.
When you write a blog, you need material for posts. You get that by reading other blogs, the news, or whatever, thinking about it, adding a bit of value, and writing about it. Writing a blog gives you a reason and motivation to think about things.
Writing a blog also forces you to think things through more carefully. What you write could be read by anyone, so you need to try not to say something excessively stupid. To sharpen this incentive, you should not blog anonymously.
You also need to think about how to explain your ideas to others. This is much harder than just having some random thoughts about a topic but not putting them into words. As the saying goes, you only truly learn something when you teach it to someone else. You may also get useful feedback from your readers, or from other bloggers, and you can learn something from them too.
I seriously think that almost everyone could benefit from writing a blog about some topic that they know a little about. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time, many blogs get by on one post a week or less. So why don’t you start writing one?
Related: Tyler Cowen on why you should take more photos.
5 Comments
That makes sense. It is
one reason I write.
You are spot on that blogging regularly helps to improve thinking and places one’s reasoning in the public domain so that others may learn or respond to it. It is also a good way to track the improvements in the understanding of a subject.
It’s also a good way to show off your thinking. People like to overthink the same way they like to overconsume. So it’s more fun to read something cool and have people know you read it. This is probably a bigger factor in why I write than I’d care to admit.
Spot on. Blogging also helped me focus more on those aspects of the increasingly complex information stream that really have a bearing on the challenges we are working on.
Aaron — Agree with most of your points. However, there are situations where anonymous blogging is both necessary and just. I humbly offer my own site as evidence. If you don’t appreciate TED, you can refer to Going Private instead.
I am sure someone more clever than I can analyze why bloggers who post anonymously and do not accept comments (like both sites mentioned above) do not suffer from excess stupidity. (I presume you will agree with me that they do not. Perhaps I am wrong.) From my perspective, I think it has to do mostly with pride. Besides, readers can always call an anonymous blogger on a stupid post via e-mail.
Anyway, it’s a big blogging universe out there, and presumably the marketplace for ideas is efficient enough to allow quality blogs to attract readers. Let a million blogs bloom!
The Epicurean Dealmaker